Blessed Unity: Ars reviews Ubuntu 10.10

Sound indicator

Canonical has been working to overhaul the notification area of the GNOME desktop panel in order to reduce icon clutter and consolidate some of the redundant panel elements. It's an ongoing project that has evolved incrementally over the past several releases.

Ubuntu 9.04 introduced the messaging indicator menu, which displays notifications from e-mail and chat applications. Ubuntu 10.04 added the Me Menu, which provides quick access to account configuration tools, social messaging, and instant message status. The most significant indicator enhancement in Ubuntu 10.10 is the new set of music playback control widgets that are integrated into the sound indicator menu.

Playback controls in the sound indicator menu

The sound indicator menu was originally designed to replace the mixer notification area icon. It allows users to toggle whether sound is muted, adjust the main volume setting by dragging a slider, or open the system sound preferences dialog. In the latest version of Ubuntu, the developers have added support for launching and controlling the Rhythmbox music player.

When Rhythmbox is running, the menu will show information about the track that is currently playing—including the title, artist, album name, and album art. Underneath the track info, the menu has three buttons for controlling playback. The center button, which is used to pause and resume playback, is flanked by skip buttons that will allow the user to jump to the next or previous track. The features exposed in the menu are basically equivalent to the functionality that was previously available from the conventional notification area icon.

When the user closes the Rhythmbox window while music is still playing, the program will continue to operate in the background. If the window is closed while music is not playing, then the program will quit. The intention is to allow the user to control music playback from the menu without having to leave the Rhythmbox window open all the time. When the window is closed, it can easily be reactivated by selecting the Rhythmbox item from the sound indicator menu.

It generally works well, but its behavior is a little bit unintuitive. It wasn't obvious to me at first what conditions cause the program to quit and what conditions cause it to hide in the background. Part of the problem is that, when you close the window and it is supposed to quit, there is often some lag between when the window disappears and when the program actually terminates. The control buttons and information about the last track that was playing will sometimes still hang around in the menu during that period when the program is in limbo. If you try to click the control buttons during that time, nothing will happen.

It makes perfect sense to terminate the program when it is hidden and no music is playing, but the way that the menu contents are updated several seconds after the window disappears is too jarring. I think that the menu would be better if it could preserve its state even after Rhythmbox is closed, so that the user can always see the last track they were playing. If they click the resume or skip buttons while Rhythmbox isn't running, the application should be launched and instructed to perform the desired operation.

For reasons that are unclear to me, I was also never able to get album art to show up in Rhythmbox. This is likely not an issue that is related to the indicator menu, because the art also wouldn't display in the application's own album art frame. I experienced this issue with several albums on two separate installations.

It's worth noting that the mechanism which enables Rhythmbox to communicate with the sound indicator menu is based on the Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification D-Bus API, which is fully open and documented. This means that third-party audio applications can implement it in order to natively support the menu. A plugin is already available for Banshee that will allow it to take advantage of the feature.

Canonical's efforts to improve the notification area are generally paying off. They have tangibly reduced desktop clutter by consolidating the notification icons. The new improvements to the sound indicator menu are another good step forward, though more work needs to be done to make its behavior more predictable to end users.

Shotwell vs F-Spot

Shotwell offers to import your photos

Ubuntu 10.10 dropped the F-Spot photo manager in favor of Shotwell, a relatively new application that was developed by non-profit software group Yorba. Because it's in an early stage of development, Shotwell's feature set is a bit sparse and the program is less mature than F-Spot. It's not a huge gap, however, and Shotwell is certainly complete enough to meet most basic photo management needs.

The decision to adopt Shotwell in Ubuntu was made at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, which took place in Brussels earlier this year. I attended the event and participated in the session where the decision was made to change the default photo manager. Novell's declining involvement in the F-Spot project and the apparent lack of adequate maintainership raised concerns about the application's long-term sustainability.

Ruben Vermeersch—who had recently taken over as the F-Spot maintainer—had a lot of great ideas, but it wasn't clear at the time if the volunteer F-Spot developer team would be able to execute. There were also too many unanswered questions about the implications of emerging plans to converge F-Spot with Banshee, a popular Mono-based music player. By comparison, Shotwell has solid backing from the folks at Yorba and a relatively unambiguous roadmap. These issues contributed to the decision made by the Ubuntu development community to adopt Shotwell in Ubuntu 10.10.

As a brief aside, I want to point out that concerns about F-Spot maintenance ended up being premature. Vermeersch's efforts to revitalize F-Spot development have largely been successful, and regular releases began to emerge again in June. A number of F-Spot's key technical problems have since been addressed, including a controversial metadata handling issue that was among the hundreds of bugs that have been fixed.

All things considered, I still prefer F-Spot, because I appreciate features like nested tags and the timeline slider that aren't available in Shotwell yet. Shotwell is maturing quickly, however, and is still arguably competitive. One advantage of Shotwell is that it is that it uses system resources more efficiently. It offers excellent performance and has a smaller memory footprint than F-Spot.